Funky

I discovered last.fm after a post by Dlade a while ago. Shortly it's a service/program that checks your taste in music and then suggests/plays similar music. You can either give your favourit artist or download a small program which "scrobbles" the music you play in i.e. iTunes. The program can then show you to other users with similar taste or create your personal "radiostation" based on your taste in music. The whole thing is based on that users tag music by genre for example. So far I've mostly used the program as a fun widget (here to the right) partly because I like the music I already have and partly because in the office my laptop is connected to the internet via U of C's lousy wlan, which can not stream music without interruptions.

However, the other day I started working more in the lab where the computer has a proper internet connection and after listening to Sweden getting beaten by Northern Ireland I switched to "my" radiostation on last.fm. After the bloody thing had played James Blunt I was ready to never ever use it again but decided to let it play music tagged "funk" instead. Now we're talking. There's a lot of Old School like Parliament and Sly Stone, some soul funk and some stuff goes towards hip-hop and acid jazz. One discoveres several good artists one never heard of before. Try for yourself.

Me like!

Calgary Transit

The bus and C-train drivers started a work-to-rule campaign today to get some momentum in the talks regarding the unions contract (which they have been lacking since June 2006). Since Calgary Transit will need to hire about 200 drivers during 2007 one might suspect that no overtime might affect them. Then, how do they go about informing their customers about possible disturbances? Well, not at all seemingly. Their webpage, which could be a good channel for informatio, says nothing about the conflict. They still have a thing or two to learn about public transport on this continent.

Excursion in Bimboland

This is the next part in the series where [cmh] explores various entertainment establishments. To celebrate that the speedskating season is over a party was arranged at the infamous night club Cowboys in Calgary. My speedskating dutch roommate had been kind enough to get me a ticket. Country music, St. Patrick's Day, speedskaters, students and bimbos made for a somewhat bizarre mix. Probably I'm not exactly the kind of customer Cowboys are aiming for, I'm too old and elitistic, one should be young and ready to paaaarty. However, it was not as bad as I had thought. One detail I'm not quite sure what I think of was the fact that most of the bar staff were siliconbased females with very small skirts. The oldest sales trick in the book?

I hope that the next issue on the agenda for bar and restaurant employees after banning smoking will be the soundlevel. I would not like to work five days a week in such an audio environment. Staff in countrybars ought to get extra pay due to the especially nasty noise the are exposed to.

Some figures:
No. of Dutchmen: >10
No. of Norwegians: >10
No. of physicists: >1
No. of three-time-olympic champions: >0
No. of fake breasts: >10

Road rage

Road rage, where people (Americans) after being treated unfairly by their fellow road users blow their top and shoot them, is a well known phenomenon. After spending a whole analyzing data I kind of wonder why one so seldom hear about computer rage. People going nuts from their computer not doing what they want it to or crashing for the millionth time ought to be fairly common. Among frustrated office clerks all revved up on caffeine in tiny cubicles the consequences could become severe. Maybe we should be glad that the Americans tend to keep their guns in the glove compartment rather than in the office drawer. Staplers make less damage.

Anyone for English?

OK, here's the deal. From now on some posts on ångestgrottan/angstgrotte may appear in both English and Swedish. There will be a neat little flag in the bottom right corner that will take you to the English (or Swedish) version of the post.
Actually the English posts will be on a seperate blog quite similar to this one since that's the only way I could solve this. Not as fancy as I had hoped for.

We'll see how long I keep this up.